三皇治世 The Three Sovereigns Ruled The World
這長老因問，即欠身合掌道：「貧僧那裡：这长老因问，即欠身合掌道：「贫僧那里：
逐句解 Line by line
At the question the elder rose a little in his seat, joined his palms and said, "In my country:
長 is zhǎng in 長老, a senior of the order. The same character reads cháng for length — and does so two passages along, in the name of the capital. The tag sits at the tail of its own sentence, welded to the narrative that leads into it, and cannot be separated from the verse it opens.
The Three Sovereigns ruled the world; the Five Emperors set the bonds of kin.
分倫 is to set out the human relations in order — the five bonds of Confucian ethics: ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, friend and friend.
Yao and Shun held the throne uprightly; Yu and Tang gave the people peace.
Four sage rulers in eight characters: one character to each name, and a two-character predicate to every pair — 正位 for the throne held rightly, 安民 for the people settled.
Zhou grew great and its sons were many; each set up a heaven and earth of his own.
乾 is qián here, the trigram — 乾坤 is heaven and earth taken together, and so a whole realm. This is the other reading of the character that meant dried bamboo shoots back at the guest house. 子 keeps its full tone zǐ, sons, rather than weakening into a mere suffix.
Leaning on strength they bullied the weak; they carved the land into states and styled themselves princes.
稱 is chēng, to call oneself something — not chèn, to fit, nor chèng, a set of scales.
Eighteen lords of the realms; the fields parcelled out, the borders in dust.
分野 means two things at once. It is a division of territory on the ground, and in the almanac it is the tract of sky assigned to each state — the earthly and the celestial partition in a single word.
Afterwards twelve remained, and the world grew settled and plain.
安淳 is the quiet that comes of simplicity rather than of enforced order. It lasts exactly one line.
For want of chariots and horses they fell to swallowing one another again.
車馬 — chariots and horses — stands for the royal progress, and so for the central authority that keeps the lords in order. Without it they eat each other. 相 is xiāng, mutually.
Seven mighty states contended for mastery; six kingdoms fell to Qin.
Seven contend and six are swallowed. The arithmetic of the couplet is the whole account of the conquest.
Asked how many reigns his country has had, the monk answers by reciting the entire dynastic succession from before recorded history. It is a spectacular piece of overshooting, and it is exactly what a well-schooled cleric would produce when invited to speak about his sovereign's pedigree.
The form is severe and almost unvarying. Twenty of the rhapsody's twenty-two units run to eight characters in two fours, and the two that do not both fall in its last movement. Nothing is decorated; it is a chain of matched four-character phrases, each carrying one whole dynasty or one whole collapse.
The rhyme is the most regular in the chapter. Twenty-three of the forty-six line-endings rhyme, all on -un, -in or -en and all in the level tone, and they fall without a single lapse on the second half of every couplet — the first halves go unrhymed throughout. Where the city rhapsody took two couplets to find its rhyme, this one never misses.